Unpeopled Quotes & Sayings

The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world. — Daniel J. Rice

My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated. — Maxine Kumin

This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace
of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
but only with the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer
such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid - to be
within the silver mirror and in her. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Solitary

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,
among this rooted folk I am alone;
the full days on their tables are their own,
to me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,
a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;
their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:
in their great country they were living things,
but here they hold their breath, as if for shame. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Force is followed by loss of strength. This is not the way of the Tao. That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end. — Laozi

Betrayed and wronged in everything,
I'll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I'll be free to have an honest heart. — Moliere

Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them. — Simon Van Booy

Zoya picked up a kefta hanging over the back of my chair. It was gold brocade, the sleeves and hem embroidered lavishly in blue, the cuffs marked with jeweled sunbursts. "Sable," she said to me, stroking the lining. "I have never loathed you more. — Leigh Bardugo

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space. — Fernando Pessoa

Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach. — Henry Beston

Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

No way. I would rather lick a toad. I would let a wicked old hag bake me into gingerbread before I married this son of a bas-ilisk who had the gall to look amused while I hyperventilated. — Betsy Schow

Locke sighed.
'So this is winning,' he said.
'It is,' replied Jean.
'It can go fuck itself,' said Locke. — Scott Lynch

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

My early book learning came to me as naturally as the seasons in ... the little town in which I grew up. ... Quite early I began to find a special charm in an unpeopled world ... of lava rock and sagebrush desert. ... I was often more purely happy at such times than I think I have ever been since. — Richard McKenna

That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be. Its unpeopled, life-filled stillness, its silence held by the crash of breaking waves below. I thought of a poem as a place into which one could wander, away from the cares of life. I realized its characters should be as unreal, and as utterly real, as the shadows that people this thicket. — Orna Ross

We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise. — C.S. Lewis

I have always disliked the morning, it is too responsible a time, with the daylight demanding that it be 'faced' and (usually when I wake for I wake late) with the sun already up and in charge of the world, with little hope of anyone usurping or challenging its authority. A shot of light in the face of a poor waking human being and another slave limps wounded into the light-occupied territory. — Janet Frame